48 Responses

Wow Lesh, I am really sorry man :/
Same thing happened to me a while ago but with CoD Black Ops, I was normally playing on a server and got a ban because I was first on the kill list?! I also asked for support, but therefor the support was never given. They couldn’t unban me even if I had proof of not cheating, so now I can’t play my 40 buck game either, oh well I hope Activision and PB get some smarter and reasonable people. Best Regards

It shows what are these anticheating protections for. Never happen to me but I am no multiplayer person.
And PunkBuster is real pain in the ass. It is still running as resident service after it is once installed and it can monitor what is running on my PC (WTF?). Actually I would tolerate a few cheaters in the game (let the real admins monitor them and kick them, I suppose it should be no problem in game which is paid and where player is a customer) instead of some idiotic bloatware installed on my machine.
Sorry man, I know my post here won’t help you but at least it is one more opinion presented online.

When I still played Bad Company 2 with my friends, one of them got hacked(on steam) and I tried to resolve this, but PB and GCC didnt care about and didnt believed that the account was hacked, in the end I only managed to get the steam account back, and my friend had to play on servers without punkbuster, that was the only way… (This was like 2 years ago)
But anyway, good luck with this dude, because its going to be a pain in the ass…. =/

Not sure how your legal system works, but I would likely be taking the offending party/parties to small claims court (you have paid for a product/service). Worst case, they don’t respond or send anyone to the court date and you get (at least) your $50 back.

I didn’t know you speak Russian, Leshcat’s. If you are really Russian or from Russia, my friend is a good hacker and he told me that Russian people are the number one hackers in the world. I do not know if my friend is telling the truth, but I don’t believe you would hack.

Hey Leshcat, I think the issue resides in the dependency of PB on scanning virtual memory processes to detect if a cheat is active.

I did a little bit of research on how these anti-cheat software works and it seems that they use heuristics to scan the virtual memory for known and unknown cheating processes. Therefore, my best guess is that you got banned because of a false positive and this might be your best option to talk to them about this issue. You can say that since their system is not perfect and scanning engines that relies on heuristics tend to get a lot of false positives and they might be able to understand this part.

However, if that still fails, you can reason out that since you bought the game and you’re not yet proven to be cheating but you got banned already because of what can be a false positive, you can state that you can take this into legal matters because you are supposed to be protected by consumer rights and, in my opinion, what they did (Support system failing to resolve this issue with you) might constitute as a violation of consumer rights since you were wrongfully banned and you did not get proper support response.

Hi, this exactly happened to me with my medal of honor warfighter account. But unlike you, i did not recieve any warnings/messages about my ban. I have been banned from the GAME (not servers) while i only played the game about 5 hours. (I saw the ban 3 months after my last play.) I did everything i could to prove my innocence, but just like you, my ban remaint and they did not help at all. I was planning to buy only battlefield 4 from ea since this incident occured to me, i will still probably will but i will try my best to buy nothing from ea and will make people notice. I know this is a punkbuster issue but who cares, Ea should be the one helping and they are not. Rot in hell Ea!

You should be able to get violation number/violation code e.g “(PB HACK) #132056” or “(AIMBOT) #50120”. You do not need the details on what triggered it. “Alex J” from evenbalance wasn’t helpful at all.

I got the same issue at school. But when I returned home and connected to my home network, the problem is gone. A friend of mine solved the issue by using a VPN network. Maybe this has something to do with your internet service provider, not your own computer.
BTW, ATI catalyst 13.8 beta is out^^
Good luck and love you buddy~

Sadly enough, Steam is the same. They reveal _nothing_ about the case and are arrogant enough to think that their system has no flaws (even though there were cases where it banned thousands of players together and had to revert changes). I have like 150 games there and I got VAC banned on CoD: MW2. I don’t really care for the actual ban (the game isn’t good at all) and it applies only to that game, but the fact that I’m now marked as a “cheater” on my profile and that some stupid server plugins on other games ban based on that fact is the shady part of the punishment. And I did nothing wrong.

I’ve worked in the gaming industry for 3 years and from my experience with similar “anti cheater” solutions you probably won’t be able to do anything.

They can’t reveal information and they probably don’t have enough ressources to sort out the false positive reports from the real cheaters.

I know it’s not fair when you’re part of this minority who got banned for no reason. However that’s the price to pay to get rid of a good chunk of those toxic players who just can’t play within the rules.

Believe me when I say that customer support agents don’t like it either, it’s just that they have to apply their policy otherwise their job is at risk.

I pretty sure my comment will displease you. I just wanted to give you the other side’s perspective.

Hi Leshcat – I know this is late but, demand a refund for the game and pester them until they provide one. They have sold you a product they are preventing you from using and if they say they can’t because you are banned, require documented proof in writing of what terms of service you have violated.

I think if more people knew that their money can be stolen at any time based on the whim of a system that has been flawed for 20 years – PunkBuster sucks and always has even since I sold gameservers in the 90s – maybe it will impact sales, which is the only way to get the attention of these egomaniacs.

I was banned from America’s Army a few years ago and it turned out to be an issue with some graphics card monitoring software I had going on in the background. Luckily for me I managed to convince them that this was the case (I sent them the software and they tested it) and the ban was overturned.

I just had the same thing happen to me in bf4, never cheated a day in my life and all of a sudden I play super good and “punkbuster” gets me banned from one of my favorite servers for a lifetime. I blamed the admins to the server for making up excuses but it seems like pb is just outdated shit software overall..